Company trying to get rid of multiple sync engines

Microsoft drew the ire of many Windows 10 Technical Preview testers when Build 9879, which was released in November, was found to be missing a key OneDrive functionality: “smart files”, which are offline placeholders containing thumbnails and metadata of OneDrive files. At the time, the company said the feature had been withdrawn in response to consumer feedback and some key parts of placeholders could return once it was done making “fundamental improvements to how Sync works.” A few days back, the company outlined its OneDrive improvement plans much more clearly.

One among many new items supported by the new and improved built-in sync feature

A few days after Windows “Blue” Build 9364 leaked onto the Internet, people are still busy dissecting it. Noted Windows bloggers Paul Thurrott and Rafael Rivera, who somehow managed to co-author a 552-page tome on Windows 8 secrets a few months back, are two such curious folks. The duo have discovered some interesting syncing functionality inside the alpha build.

With so many cloud computing storage services available to you, you don’t ever truly need to pay for online storage. When your 2GB DropBox runs out, you can always get 5 free gigs from Amazon. When that runs out, why not open up a SkyDrive account for an additional 7GB? The only problem with cloud computing is that your files get spread out over different services, which can make it harder to find things, and can also increase your exposure to risk of losing access to files. If you use 3 online cloud services, there’s three times the chance that some of your files will be inaccessible at any given time, due to service outage. In this article, we’ll show you how to mitigate both of these problems, by using GoodSync to keep an up-to-date local backup of all the files on multiple cloud computing storage services.

PC users must be optimists. Sure, we flame and troll and gripe about every little thing, but how on earth can you explain the fact that so many of us don't back up our data, other than raw, bordering-on-delusional optimism? Your hard drive is safe right now, of course, but what are the odds that it will get damaged, corrupted, power-surged, hacked, stolen, flooded, burned or earthquake-d in the next year? We'll answer that one for you: too high to ignore.

So if you've managed to go this long without implementing a good backup system, read on. We've put together a quick primer on the 6 forms of data backup available to you. Pick two, spend 30 minutes setting them up, and you'll never have to worry about your data again.

The latest Chrome Beta features the ability to sync tabs across multiple devices, Google revealed in a blog post Tuesday. The ability to sync tabs has been a long time coming as far as Chrome is concerned, with Firefox having had it as an integrated feature since the release of version 4 last year. More after the jump.

These days it can be a bit difficult to get oneself excited about the release of a new version of a web browser, for the simple reason that it’s something that happens far too often. But if for some reason you still want to get your hands on Firefox 11 just before its official release on Tuesday, you can do so as the said version seems to have slipped out ahead of time.

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, than Acer has a serious case of Apple envy. At the company’s pre-CES conference in Las Vegas, Acer introduced a brand new Ultrabook tablet powered by a new set of cloud services that seem more than a little familiar. AcerCloud, not to be confused with iCloud offers photo, document, and media sharing between your PC or other Android devices.

After months of trials and tweaking in the Chrome experimental and beta channels, Google has finally added multi-account logins to Chrome’s official build. The feature is now called “Sign in to Chrome,” but was previously being called Chrome Sync. Users will have the option to authorize any copy of Chrome they use to pull down bookmarks, web history, extensions, and more.

Cloud-based services such as Dropbox, SugarSync and Box simplify our lives by making even our most complex files obtainable with push button simplicity anywhere there’s an internet connection. Google Docs boils this convenience down even further by combining a robust document creation application and file syncing into one free-to-use solution. But to get down to the nitty-gritty essence of cloud-based note taking, we’d like to suggest you give Quick Note a try--it’s our Chrome Web App of the Week.

A little snafu over at Dropbox HQ has served to remind us how imperfect the cloud still is for storage of all our personal data. Over the weekend, an observant user noticed that following a password change, he was able to log into his cloud storage account with any password at all, even if it was just one letter long. Weird, right? Well it turns out it wasn’t just him. Anyone could log into any Dropbox with any password.